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House-Warming

In October I went a-graping to the river meadows, and loaded myself with
clusters more precious for their beauty and fragrance than for food.
There, too, I admired, though I did not gather, the cranberries, small
waxen gems, pendants of the meadow grass, pearly and red, which the farmer
plucks with an ugly rake, leaving the smooth meadow in a snarl, heedlessly
measuring them by the bushel and the dollar only, and sells the spoils of
the meads to Boston and New York; destined to be jammed, to satisfy
the tastes of lovers of Nature there. So butchers rake the tongues of
bison out of the prairie grass, regardless of the torn and drooping plant.
The barberry's brilliant fruit was likewise food for my eyes merely; but I
collected a small store of wild apples for coddling, which the proprietor
and travellers had overlooked. When chestnuts were ripe I laid up half a
bushel for winter. It was very exciting at that season to roam the then
boundless chestnut woods of Lincoln—they now sleep their long sleep
under the railroad—with a bag on my shoulder, and a stick to open
burs with in my hand, for I did not always wait for the frost, amid the
rustling of leaves and the loud reproofs of the red squirrels and the
jays, whose half-consumed nuts I sometimes stole, for the burs which they
had selected were sure to contain sound ones. Occasionally I climbed and
shook the trees. They grew also behind my house, and one large tree, which
almost overshadowed it, was, when in flower, a bouquet which scented the
whole neighborhood, but the squirrels and the jays got most of its fruit;
the last coming in flocks early in the morning and picking the nuts out of
the burs before they fell, I relinquished these trees to them and visited
the more distant woods composed wholly of chestnut. These nuts, as far as
they went, were a good substitute for bread. Many other substitutes might,
perhaps, be found. Digging one day for fishworms, I discovered the
ground-nut (Apios tuberosa) on its string, the potato of the
aborigines, a sort of fabulous fruit, which I had begun to doubt if I had
ever dug and eaten in childhood, as I had told, and had not dreamed it. I
had often since seen its crumpled red velvety blossom supported by the
stems of other plants without knowing it to be the same. Cultivation has
well-nigh exterminated it. It has a sweetish taste, much like that of a
frost-bitten potato, and I found it better boiled than roasted. This tuber
seemed like a faint promise of Nature to rear her own children and feed
them simply here at some future period. In these days of fatted cattle and
waving grain-fields this humble root, which was once the totem of
an Indian tribe, is quite forgotten, or known only by its flowering vine;
but let wild Nature reign here once more, and the tender and luxurious
English grains will probably disappear before a myriad of foes, and
without the care of man the crow may carry back even the last seed of corn
to the great cornfield of the Indian's God in the southwest, whence he is
said to have brought it; but the now almost exterminated ground-nut will
perhaps revive and flourish in spite of frosts and wildness, prove itself
indigenous, and resume its ancient importance and dignity as the diet of
the hunter tribe. Some Indian Ceres or Minerva must have been the inventor
and bestower of it; and when the reign of poetry commences here, its
leaves and string of nuts may be represented on our works of art.

Already, by the first of September, I had seen two or three small maples
turned scarlet across the pond, beneath where the white stems of three
aspens diverged, at the point of a promontory, next the water. Ah, many a
tale their color told! And gradually from week to week the character of
each tree came out, and it admired itself reflected in the smooth mirror
of the lake. Each morning the manager of this gallery substituted some new
picture, distinguished by more brilliant or harmonious coloring, for the
old upon the walls.

The wasps came by thousands to my lodge in October, as to winter quarters,
and settled on my windows within and on the walls overhead, sometimes
deterring visitors from entering. Each morning, when they were numbed with
cold, I swept some of them out, but I did not trouble myself much to get
rid of them; I even felt complimented by their regarding my house as a
desirable shelter. They never molested me seriously, though they bedded
with me; and they gradually disappeared, into what crevices I do not know,
avoiding winter and unspeakable cold.

Like the wasps, before I finally went into winter quarters in November, I
used to resort to the northeast side of Walden, which the sun, reflected
from the pitch pine woods and the stony shore, made the fireside of the
pond; it is so much pleasanter and wholesomer to be warmed by the sun
while you can be, than by an artificial fire. I thus warmed myself by the
still glowing embers which the summer, like a departed hunter, had left.

When I came to build my chimney I studied masonry. My bricks, being
second-hand ones, required to be cleaned with a trowel, so that I learned
more than usual of the qualities of bricks and trowels. The mortar on them
was fifty years old, and was said to be still growing harder; but this is
one of those sayings which men love to repeat whether they are true or
not. Such sayings themselves grow harder and adhere more firmly with age,
and it would take many blows with a trowel to clean an old wiseacre of
them. Many of the villages of Mesopotamia are built of second-hand bricks
of a very good quality, obtained from the ruins of Babylon, and the cement
on them is older and probably harder still. However that may be, I was
struck by the peculiar toughness of the steel which bore so many violent
blows without being worn out. As my bricks had been in a chimney before,
though I did not read the name of Nebuchadnezzar on them, I picked out as
many fireplace bricks as I could find, to save work and waste, and I
filled the spaces between the bricks about the fireplace with stones from
the pond shore, and also made my mortar with the white sand from the same
place. I lingered most about the fireplace, as the most vital part of the
house. Indeed, I worked so deliberately, that though I commenced at the
ground in the morning, a course of bricks raised a few inches above the
floor served for my pillow at night; yet I did not get a stiff neck for it
that I remember; my stiff neck is of older date. I took a poet to board
for a fortnight about those times, which caused me to be put to it for
room. He brought his own knife, though I had two, and we used to scour
them by thrusting them into the earth. He shared with me the labors of
cooking. I was pleased to see my work rising so square and solid by
degrees, and reflected, that, if it proceeded slowly, it was calculated to
endure a long time. The chimney is to some extent an independent
structure, standing on the ground, and rising through the house to the
heavens; even after the house is burned it still stands sometimes, and its
importance and independence are apparent. This was toward the end of
summer. It was now November.

The north wind had already begun to cool the pond, though it took many
weeks of steady blowing to accomplish it, it is so deep. When I began to
have a fire at evening, before I plastered my house, the chimney carried
smoke particularly well, because of the numerous chinks between the
boards. Yet I passed some cheerful evenings in that cool and airy
apartment, surrounded by the rough brown boards full of knots, and rafters
with the bark on high overhead. My house never pleased my eye so much
after it was plastered, though I was obliged to confess that it was more
comfortable. Should not every apartment in which man dwells be lofty
enough to create some obscurity overhead, where flickering shadows may
play at evening about the rafters? These forms are more agreeable to the
fancy and imagination than fresco paintings or other the most expensive
furniture. I now first began to inhabit my house, I may say, when I began
to use it for warmth as well as shelter. I had got a couple of old
fire-dogs to keep the wood from the hearth, and it did me good to see the
soot form on the back of the chimney which I had built, and I poked the
fire with more right and more satisfaction than usual. My dwelling was
small, and I could hardly entertain an echo in it; but it seemed larger
for being a single apartment and remote from neighbors. All the
attractions of a house were concentrated in one room; it was kitchen,
chamber, parlor, and keeping-room; and whatever satisfaction parent or
child, master or servant, derive from living in a house, I enjoyed it all.
Cato says, the master of a family (patremfamilias) must have in his
rustic villa "cellam oleariam, vinariam, dolia multa, uti lubeat caritatem
expectare, et rei, et virtuti, et gloriae erit," that is, "an oil and wine
cellar, many casks, so that it may be pleasant to expect hard times; it
will be for his advantage, and virtue, and glory." I had in my cellar a
firkin of potatoes, about two quarts of peas with the weevil in them, and
on my shelf a little rice, a jug of molasses, and of rye and Indian meal a
peck each.

I sometimes dream of a larger and more populous house, standing in a
golden age, of enduring materials, and without gingerbread work, which
shall still consist of only one room, a vast, rude, substantial, primitive
hall, without ceiling or plastering, with bare rafters and purlins
supporting a sort of lower heaven over one's head—useful to keep off
rain and snow, where the king and queen posts stand out to receive your
homage, when you have done reverence to the prostrate Saturn of an older
dynasty on stepping over the sill; a cavernous house, wherein you must
reach up a torch upon a pole to see the roof; where some may live in the
fireplace, some in the recess of a window, and some on settles, some at
one end of the hall, some at another, and some aloft on rafters with the
spiders, if they choose; a house which you have got into when you have
opened the outside door, and the ceremony is over; where the weary
traveller may wash, and eat, and converse, and sleep, without further
journey; such a shelter as you would be glad to reach in a tempestuous
night, containing all the essentials of a house, and nothing for
house-keeping; where you can see all the treasures of the house at one
view, and everything hangs upon its peg, that a man should use; at once
kitchen, pantry, parlor, chamber, storehouse, and garret; where you can
see so necessary a thing, as a barrel or a ladder, so convenient a thing
as a cupboard, and hear the pot boil, and pay your respects to the fire
that cooks your dinner, and the oven that bakes your bread, and the
necessary furniture and utensils are the chief ornaments; where the
washing is not put out, nor the fire, nor the mistress, and perhaps you
are sometimes requested to move from off the trap-door, when the cook
would descend into the cellar, and so learn whether the ground is solid or
hollow beneath you without stamping. A house whose inside is as open and
manifest as a bird's nest, and you cannot go in at the front door and out
at the back without seeing some of its inhabitants; where to be a guest is
to be presented with the freedom of the house, and not to be carefully
excluded from seven eighths of it, shut up in a particular cell, and told
to make yourself at home there—in solitary confinement. Nowadays the
host does not admit you to his hearth, but has got the mason to
build one for yourself somewhere in his alley, and hospitality is the art
of keeping you at the greatest distance. There is as much secrecy
about the cooking as if he had a design to poison you. I am aware that I
have been on many a man's premises, and might have been legally ordered
off, but I am not aware that I have been in many men's houses. I might
visit in my old clothes a king and queen who lived simply in such a house
as I have described, if I were going their way; but backing out of a
modern palace will be all that I shall desire to learn, if ever I am
caught in one.

It would seem as if the very language of our parlors would lose all its
nerve and degenerate into palaver wholly, our lives pass at such
remoteness from its symbols, and its metaphors and tropes are necessarily
so far fetched, through slides and dumb-waiters, as it were; in other
words, the parlor is so far from the kitchen and workshop. The dinner even
is only the parable of a dinner, commonly. As if only the savage dwelt
near enough to Nature and Truth to borrow a trope from them. How can the
scholar, who dwells away in the North West Territory or the Isle of Man,
tell what is parliamentary in the kitchen?

However, only one or two of my guests were ever bold enough to stay and
eat a hasty-pudding with me; but when they saw that crisis approaching
they beat a hasty retreat rather, as if it would shake the house to its
foundations. Nevertheless, it stood through a great many hasty-puddings.

I did not plaster till it was freezing weather. I brought over some whiter
and cleaner sand for this purpose from the opposite shore of the pond in a
boat, a sort of conveyance which would have tempted me to go much farther
if necessary. My house had in the meanwhile been shingled down to the
ground on every side. In lathing I was pleased to be able to send home
each nail with a single blow of the hammer, and it was my ambition to
transfer the plaster from the board to the wall neatly and rapidly. I
remembered the story of a conceited fellow, who, in fine clothes, was wont
to lounge about the village once, giving advice to workmen. Venturing one
day to substitute deeds for words, he turned up his cuffs, seized a
plasterer's board, and having loaded his trowel without mishap, with a
complacent look toward the lathing overhead, made a bold gesture
thitherward; and straightway, to his complete discomfiture, received the
whole contents in his ruffled bosom. I admired anew the economy and
convenience of plastering, which so effectually shuts out the cold and
takes a handsome finish, and I learned the various casualties to which the
plasterer is liable. I was surprised to see how thirsty the bricks were
which drank up all the moisture in my plaster before I had smoothed it,
and how many pailfuls of water it takes to christen a new hearth. I had
the previous winter made a small quantity of lime by burning the shells of
the Unio fluviatilis, which our river affords, for the sake of the
experiment; so that I knew where my materials came from. I might have got
good limestone within a mile or two and burned it myself, if I had cared
to do so.

The pond had in the meanwhile skimmed over in the shadiest and shallowest
coves, some days or even weeks before the general freezing. The first ice
is especially interesting and perfect, being hard, dark, and transparent,
and affords the best opportunity that ever offers for examining the bottom
where it is shallow; for you can lie at your length on ice only an inch
thick, like a skater insect on the surface of the water, and study the
bottom at your leisure, only two or three inches distant, like a picture
behind a glass, and the water is necessarily always smooth then. There are
many furrows in the sand where some creature has travelled about and
doubled on its tracks; and, for wrecks, it is strewn with the cases of
caddis-worms made of minute grains of white quartz. Perhaps these have
creased it, for you find some of their cases in the furrows, though they
are deep and broad for them to make. But the ice itself is the object of
most interest, though you must improve the earliest opportunity to study
it. If you examine it closely the morning after it freezes, you find that
the greater part of the bubbles, which at first appeared to be within it,
are against its under surface, and that more are continually rising from
the bottom; while the ice is as yet comparatively solid and dark, that is,
you see the water through it. These bubbles are from an eightieth to an
eighth of an inch in diameter, very clear and beautiful, and you see your
face reflected in them through the ice. There may be thirty or forty of
them to a square inch. There are also already within the ice narrow oblong
perpendicular bubbles about half an inch long, sharp cones with the apex
upward; or oftener, if the ice is quite fresh, minute spherical bubbles
one directly above another, like a string of beads. But these within the
ice are not so numerous nor obvious as those beneath. I sometimes used to
cast on stones to try the strength of the ice, and those which broke
through carried in air with them, which formed very large and conspicuous
white bubbles beneath. One day when I came to the same place forty-eight
hours afterward, I found that those large bubbles were still perfect,
though an inch more of ice had formed, as I could see distinctly by the
seam in the edge of a cake. But as the last two days had been very warm,
like an Indian summer, the ice was not now transparent, showing the dark
green color of the water, and the bottom, but opaque and whitish or gray,
and though twice as thick was hardly stronger than before, for the air
bubbles had greatly expanded under this heat and run together, and lost
their regularity; they were no longer one directly over another, but often
like silvery coins poured from a bag, one overlapping another, or in thin
flakes, as if occupying slight cleavages. The beauty of the ice was gone,
and it was too late to study the bottom. Being curious to know what
position my great bubbles occupied with regard to the new ice, I broke out
a cake containing a middling sized one, and turned it bottom upward. The
new ice had formed around and under the bubble, so that it was included
between the two ices. It was wholly in the lower ice, but close against
the upper, and was flattish, or perhaps slightly lenticular, with a
rounded edge, a quarter of an inch deep by four inches in diameter; and I
was surprised to find that directly under the bubble the ice was melted
with great regularity in the form of a saucer reversed, to the height of
five eighths of an inch in the middle, leaving a thin partition there
between the water and the bubble, hardly an eighth of an inch thick; and
in many places the small bubbles in this partition had burst out downward,
and probably there was no ice at all under the largest bubbles, which were
a foot in diameter. I inferred that the infinite number of minute bubbles
which I had first seen against the under surface of the ice were now
frozen in likewise, and that each, in its degree, had operated like a
burning-glass on the ice beneath to melt and rot it. These are the little
air-guns which contribute to make the ice crack and whoop.

At length the winter set in good earnest, just as I had finished
plastering, and the wind began to howl around the house as if it had not
had permission to do so till then. Night after night the geese came
lumbering in the dark with a clangor and a whistling of wings, even after
the ground was covered with snow, some to alight in Walden, and some
flying low over the woods toward Fair Haven, bound for Mexico. Several
times, when returning from the village at ten or eleven o'clock at night,
I heard the tread of a flock of geese, or else ducks, on the dry leaves in
the woods by a pond-hole behind my dwelling, where they had come up to
feed, and the faint honk or quack of their leader as they hurried off. In
1845 Walden froze entirely over for the first time on the night of the 22d
of December, Flint's and other shallower ponds and the river having been
frozen ten days or more; in '46, the 16th; in '49, about the 31st; and in
'50, about the 27th of December; in '52, the 5th of January; in '53, the
31st of December. The snow had already covered the ground since the 25th
of November, and surrounded me suddenly with the scenery of winter. I
withdrew yet farther into my shell, and endeavored to keep a bright fire
both within my house and within my breast. My employment out of doors now
was to collect the dead wood in the forest, bringing it in my hands or on
my shoulders, or sometimes trailing a dead pine tree under each arm to my
shed. An old forest fence which had seen its best days was a great haul
for me. I sacrificed it to Vulcan, for it was past serving the god
Terminus. How much more interesting an event is that man's supper who has
just been forth in the snow to hunt, nay, you might say, steal, the fuel
to cook it with! His bread and meat are sweet. There are enough fagots and
waste wood of all kinds in the forests of most of our towns to support
many fires, but which at present warm none, and, some think, hinder the
growth of the young wood. There was also the driftwood of the pond. In the
course of the summer I had discovered a raft of pitch pine logs with the
bark on, pinned together by the Irish when the railroad was built. This I
hauled up partly on the shore. After soaking two years and then lying high
six months it was perfectly sound, though waterlogged past drying. I
amused myself one winter day with sliding this piecemeal across the pond,
nearly half a mile, skating behind with one end of a log fifteen feet long
on my shoulder, and the other on the ice; or I tied several logs together
with a birch withe, and then, with a longer birch or alder which had a
hook at the end, dragged them across. Though completely waterlogged and
almost as heavy as lead, they not only burned long, but made a very hot
fire; nay, I thought that they burned better for the soaking, as if the
pitch, being confined by the water, burned longer, as in a lamp.

Gilpin, in his account of the forest borderers of England, says that "the
encroachments of trespassers, and the houses and fences thus raised on the
borders of the forest," were "considered as great nuisances by the old
forest law, and were severely punished under the name of purprestures,
as tending ad terrorem ferarum—ad nocumentum forestae, etc.,"
to the frightening of the game and the detriment of the forest. But I was
interested in the preservation of the venison and the vert more than the
hunters or woodchoppers, and as much as though I had been the Lord Warden
himself; and if any part was burned, though I burned it myself by
accident, I grieved with a grief that lasted longer and was more
inconsolable than that of the proprietors; nay, I grieved when it was cut
down by the proprietors themselves. I would that our farmers when they cut
down a forest felt some of that awe which the old Romans did when they
came to thin, or let in the light to, a consecrated grove (lucum
conlucare), that is, would believe that it is sacred to some god. The
Roman made an expiatory offering, and prayed, Whatever god or goddess thou
art to whom this grove is sacred, be propitious to me, my family, and
children, etc.

It is remarkable what a value is still put upon wood even in this age and
in this new country, a value more permanent and universal than that of
gold. After all our discoveries and inventions no man will go by a pile of
wood. It is as precious to us as it was to our Saxon and Norman ancestors.
If they made their bows of it, we make our gun-stocks of it. Michaux, more
than thirty years ago, says that the price of wood for fuel in New York
and Philadelphia "nearly equals, and sometimes exceeds, that of the best
wood in Paris, though this immense capital annually requires more than
three hundred thousand cords, and is surrounded to the distance of three
hundred miles by cultivated plains." In this town the price of wood rises
almost steadily, and the only question is, how much higher it is to be
this year than it was the last. Mechanics and tradesmen who come in person
to the forest on no other errand, are sure to attend the wood auction, and
even pay a high price for the privilege of gleaning after the woodchopper.
It is now many years that men have resorted to the forest for fuel and the
materials of the arts: the New Englander and the New Hollander, the
Parisian and the Celt, the farmer and Robin Hood, Goody Blake and Harry
Gill; in most parts of the world the prince and the peasant, the scholar
and the savage, equally require still a few sticks from the forest to warm
them and cook their food. Neither could I do without them.

Every man looks at his wood-pile with a kind of affection. I love to have
mine before my window, and the more chips the better to remind me of my
pleasing work. I had an old axe which nobody claimed, with which by spells
in winter days, on the sunny side of the house, I played about the stumps
which I had got out of my bean-field. As my driver prophesied when I was
plowing, they warmed me twice—once while I was splitting them, and
again when they were on the fire, so that no fuel could give out more
heat. As for the axe, I was advised to get the village blacksmith to
"jump" it; but I jumped him, and, putting a hickory helve from the woods
into it, made it do. If it was dull, it was at least hung true.

A few pieces of fat pine were a great treasure. It is interesting to
remember how much of this food for fire is still concealed in the bowels
of the earth. In previous years I had often gone prospecting over some
bare hillside, where a pitch pine wood had formerly stood, and got out the
fat pine roots. They are almost indestructible. Stumps thirty or forty
years old, at least, will still be sound at the core, though the sapwood
has all become vegetable mould, as appears by the scales of the thick bark
forming a ring level with the earth four or five inches distant from the
heart. With axe and shovel you explore this mine, and follow the marrowy
store, yellow as beef tallow, or as if you had struck on a vein of gold,
deep into the earth. But commonly I kindled my fire with the dry leaves of
the forest, which I had stored up in my shed before the snow came. Green
hickory finely split makes the woodchopper's kindlings, when he has a camp
in the woods. Once in a while I got a little of this. When the villagers
were lighting their fires beyond the horizon, I too gave notice to the
various wild inhabitants of Walden vale, by a smoky streamer from my
chimney, that I was awake.—

Light-winged Smoke, Icarian bird,
Melting thy pinions in thy upward flight,
Lark without song, and messenger of dawn,
Circling above the hamlets as thy nest;
Or else, departing dream, and shadowy form
Of midnight vision, gathering up thy skirts;
By night star-veiling, and by day
Darkening the light and blotting out the sun;
Go thou my incense upward from this hearth,
And ask the gods to pardon this clear flame.

Hard green wood just cut, though I used but little of that, answered my
purpose better than any other. I sometimes left a good fire when I went to
take a walk in a winter afternoon; and when I returned, three or four
hours afterward, it would be still alive and glowing. My house was not
empty though I was gone. It was as if I had left a cheerful housekeeper
behind. It was I and Fire that lived there; and commonly my housekeeper
proved trustworthy. One day, however, as I was splitting wood, I thought
that I would just look in at the window and see if the house was not on
fire; it was the only time I remember to have been particularly anxious on
this score; so I looked and saw that a spark had caught my bed, and I went
in and extinguished it when it had burned a place as big as my hand. But
my house occupied so sunny and sheltered a position, and its roof was so
low, that I could afford to let the fire go out in the middle of almost
any winter day.

The moles nested in my cellar, nibbling every third potato, and making a
snug bed even there of some hair left after plastering and of brown paper;
for even the wildest animals love comfort and warmth as well as man, and
they survive the winter only because they are so careful to secure them.
Some of my friends spoke as if I was coming to the woods on purpose to
freeze myself. The animal merely makes a bed, which he warms with his
body, in a sheltered place; but man, having discovered fire, boxes up some
air in a spacious apartment, and warms that, instead of robbing himself,
makes that his bed, in which he can move about divested of more cumbrous
clothing, maintain a kind of summer in the midst of winter, and by means
of windows even admit the light, and with a lamp lengthen out the day.
Thus he goes a step or two beyond instinct, and saves a little time for
the fine arts. Though, when I had been exposed to the rudest blasts a long
time, my whole body began to grow torpid, when I reached the genial
atmosphere of my house I soon recovered my faculties and prolonged my
life. But the most luxuriously housed has little to boast of in this
respect, nor need we trouble ourselves to speculate how the human race may
be at last destroyed. It would be easy to cut their threads any time with
a little sharper blast from the north. We go on dating from Cold Fridays
and Great Snows; but a little colder Friday, or greater snow would put a
period to man's existence on the globe.

The next winter I used a small cooking-stove for economy, since I did not
own the forest; but it did not keep fire so well as the open fireplace.
Cooking was then, for the most part, no longer a poetic, but merely a
chemic process. It will soon be forgotten, in these days of stoves, that
we used to roast potatoes in the ashes, after the Indian fashion. The
stove not only took up room and scented the house, but it concealed the
fire, and I felt as if I had lost a companion. You can always see a face
in the fire. The laborer, looking into it at evening, purifies his
thoughts of the dross and earthiness which they have accumulated during
the day. But I could no longer sit and look into the fire, and the
pertinent words of a poet recurred to me with new force.—

"Never, bright flame, may be denied to me
Thy dear, life imaging, close sympathy.
What but my hopes shot upward e'er so bright?
What but my fortunes sunk so low in night?
Why art thou banished from our hearth and hall,
Thou who art welcomed and beloved by all?
Was thy existence then too fanciful
For our life's common light, who are so dull?
Did thy bright gleam mysterious converse hold
With our congenial souls? secrets too bold?

Well, we are safe and strong, for now we sit
Beside a hearth where no dim shadows flit,
Where nothing cheers nor saddens, but a fire
Warms feet and hands—nor does to more aspire;
By whose compact utilitarian heap
The present may sit down and go to sleep,
Nor fear the ghosts who from the dim past walked,
And with us by the unequal light of the old wood fire talked."

New Thought Holidays

New Thought Day was declared by James Edgerton on August 23rd, 1915
During research while expanding the free New Thought Library,
one of the ministers came across an interesting quote from early New Thought Alliance President James A. Edgerton:
"'The truth, once announced, has the power not only to renew but to extend itself.
New Thought is universal in its ideals and therefore should be universal in its appeal.
Under the guidance of the spirit, it should grow in good works until it embraces many lands and eventually the whole world.'
~
New Thought Day, August 23rd
, 1915."

"'The truth, once announced, has the power not only to renew but to extend itself.
New Thought is universal in its ideals and therefore should be universal in its appeal.
Under the guidance of the spirit, it should grow in good works until it embraces many lands and eventually the whole world.'
~ James A. Edgerton, New Thought Day, August 23rd, 1915."

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